100 Days of Code: Day 14

I finished the first 4 sections of Programming Foundations: Fundamentals. While I didn’t exactly learn anything new, it did help to reinforce some of the things that I have learned in the past and even explained a few concepts better. The course instructor, Simon Allardice, even did an amazing job explaining why it is a good idea to use the strict equality operator in JavaScript and many of the similarities and differences between programming languages, markups, and scripts. I think it’s an extremely valuable use of my time to continue watching and learning with this course.

.I’ve given up on two things already this week. But it’s not because I am lazy or don’t want to push myself; I’m just not sure that they are the best for me right now.

r/dailyprogrammer

First, I tried going through the easy projects on the dailyprogrammer subreddit to find one that matched up with where I think I am at currently. This led to thirty minutes of frustration as I couldn’t seem to find much that I thought I might be able to do — and these are the EASY projects. To be honest, I just didn’t understand half of them. It’s hard to do something when you don’t even understand the brief.

I felt a little better about not understanding when I read some of the comments in the challenge from January 8, 2018 : Challenge #346 [Easy] Cryptarithmetic Solver. The first comment was from TheSlickMachine and he seems to feel the same way I was feeling.

Are there any of you guys working in software development that look at some of these labelled [Easy] and have no ******* clue how to even begin working on the solutions?

I’ve probably looked at 50 of these and tried half of them and figured out a solution for one.

And his sentiments were echoed again and again, with people replying that they too had thought about giving up.

So, that’s what I have decided to do for now. In truth, I like the complexity of the problems or at least the ones that I could actually understand. I will definitely be coming back later, but maybe not in round one of my 100 days of code.

JavaScript30

After admitting defeat, I tried starting on the JavaScript30 course again since I didn’t give it much of a chance before. Yeah… I gave up after 20 minutes.

I don’t wish to say anything bad about the guy teaching the course, but I will say that his style of teaching is not exactly compatible with my style of learning. I don’t need everything spelled out as I am a relatively quick learner. But I do prefer some explanation about what is going on.

Perhaps the course just isn’t for me? If I want to attempt the projects later on (without trying to follow along with the videos), I may do that. Otherwise, I am just going to call it quits on the course altogether.

I am doing things a little bit differently today and posting this update in the middle of my coding exercise. I haven’t quite decided what I am going to do next and wanted to address my “failures” now while they are still fresh on my mind.

With that said, tomorrow I will provide more of an update on anything else that I am able to accomplish today.